The resignation of Keir Starmer on Monday June 22 does not only reflect the exhaustion of a man or the ferocity of a Labor Party that has become ungovernable again. It alerts us to something deeper: in three major European democracies, government forces are no longer just contested; they are surrounded.
In the United Kingdom, the Prime Minister is leaving, caught between the hammer of the Labor left and the hard place of the far-right Reform UK party. Nigel Farage, its leader, given the lead in voting intentions, is already exercising a power of paralysis. Starmer has satisfied neither the cautious pro-Europeans nor those who see in every post-Brexit gesture the betrayal of a mythologized people. The British paradox is cruel: the country voted for Brexit without ever being permanently governed by consistent “Brexiters”. If it were to be tomorrow, it would be a major shock for European security.
Resentment transformed into electoral force
It will be said that the United Kingdom is suffering the drag of Brexit: seven prime ministers in ten years, a swallowed-up Conservative party, Labor which returned too late, too managerial, too unimaginative. But the story does not stop at the Channel. In France, one year before the presidential election, the National Rally dominates the political landscape, helped by LFI and by a hemicycle which transforms each vote into a crisis.
The prime ministers procrastinate; the RN is waiting. In Germany, the shocks are different but the results converge. The country is paying off its triple bet of yesterday: exports to China, Russian energy, Atlanticism without a second thought. Recession, deindustrialization, strategic anxiety: the transition to another economy and another Germany (the famous Zeitenwende – “change of times” – mentioned by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in his speech to the Bundestag on February 27, 2022) fuels resentment that the far-right AfD party transforms into electoral force.
Different crises therefore, but shared dynamics: technocrats who administer but struggle to convince; a social democracy that no longer promises security for the future; a deindustrialization which is also a loss of collective honor; a professionalization of politics which gives the feeling of only speaking to its insiders. The populist rights do not invent these evils, but they weaponize them. They point out the failures of governments that they help to paralyze – then present themselves as the cure for impotence.
The far right as arbiter of reality
This is precisely why the reasoning of those who claim to fight them by taking up part of their themes is so dangerous: it aims to contain the extreme right, but it establishes it as the arbiter of reality. The most worrying thing is therefore not only the rise of extremes; it is the shift of the center of gravity from the right towards their reasoning.
The center right takes up its words, its obsessions, sometimes its policies: immigration reduced to threat, “punitive” ecology, migration pact, security become identity, “anti-wokism” brandished as a political philosophy. In the United Kingdom, the contagion has also spread to the center left: on the “small boats” crossing the Channel, Starmer has often borrowed conservative and Faragist rhetoric.
We like to repeat that the voters abandoned the center, but it is the center that abandoned the voters. Because an electorate is not picked, it is cultivated, it is built. If it is a center that we want to build, it is not enough to bring together the disappointed and cautious from all sides in the hope that this will form a doctrine.
Addition is not a vision
Emmanuel Macron could have built a center electorate; above all, he constructed an instrument of power. And again. Tony Blair had conquered the center without rebuilding it. Starmer even less so. In Germany, Friedrich Merz’s coalition is also trying to add up, compensate, distribute: a little for the right, a little for the SPD, a little to reassure the markets. But the addition is not a vision.
In France, we have sung the praises of compromise a lot – and regretted our lack of experience in this area. This was perhaps normal given the brutality of the postures, but for many voters, there is only a small step between compromise and compromise.
Moreover, populist parties brandish coalitions, cohabitation, government agreements as proof that a supposedly opposing political class shares the same desire to stay in power. Political science has shown it: when government parties converge without a clear plan, voters look elsewhere for a difference, even a dangerous one.
Find an intellectual column
The center – right or left – will be reborn neither by pure arithmetic, nor simply by anti-fascist reflex, and certainly not by imitation of the extreme right. It will be reborn if it finds an intellectual pillar: telling the truth about constraints without giving up transforming reality; protect those most exposed without giving in to withdrawal; recognize concerns without converting them into resentment; make Europe not a scapegoat, but the scale on which democratic sovereignty is rebuilt.
It is not a question of asking voters to be reasonable, but of giving them good reasons to be so. Otherwise, next year, three countries at the heart of Europe could shift towards forces whose first adversary is precisely what remains most precious to us: European construction.
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